Unsealed Pasts: Ersatz Genealogies and Michael Rakowitz’s Cylinder Seals

Rossman, Aleksandr Balashov (10 November 2022). Unsealed Pasts: Ersatz Genealogies and Michael Rakowitz’s Cylinder Seals (Unpublished). In: Mobile Memories. Humboldt University, Berlin (Germany). November 10-11, 2022.

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In the past year, Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz has fabricated a series of cylindrical
seals that replicate originals which were looted from the national museum of Irak in the wake
of the US invasion in 2003. Rakowitz’s ersatz-seals are made from packaging materials of
Arabic consumer goods that circulate in the United States today. This talk explores the
multiple ways in which these objects layer sets of circulating memories and actions with longlasting
effects in the form of ghosts.
Mesopotamian seals, which developed ca. 3500 BC, were among the first objects of their
kind: matricies that could leave indexical marks of ownership and property in a society in the
midst of economic and cultural flux. Today, these matricies have been lost; they have been
taken from museums intended to preserve them as part of a national legacy and now circulate
in new economic and diasporic contexts, under the radar – sometimes used as currency to pay
for migration outside Iraq. Using Interpol data and photographic indexes as sources,
Rakowitz’s doppelgängers both trace and bring the interrupted presence of these objects back
to life by reinserting them into museums and galleries in the West. In doing so, his objects
point to the ways in which the original cylinders, marks of identity tied to specific claims on
historically and regionally specific spaces, are now part of a dispersed and diasporic pool of
memories. They are itinerant objects whose mobility was part of their initial function, but
which has been reshaped by recent economic and political conflicts that Rakowitz’s phantoms
illuminate.
Rakowitz’s ghosts haunt the West as reminders of a past that refuses to go away; the artist
highlights how the conflicts that led to the objects’ disappearance are deeply linked to the
political logic undergirding their value as a result of colonial politics and the valorization of
these objects in Western culture. At the same time, his transformation of popular Arabic food
containers that circulate globally today builds a new library of images that links the vanished
seals to an embodied diasporic presence constituted through shared tastes and flavors, as well
as economic networks. In Rakowitz’s seals, absence becomes a motor to create an embodied
present from a matrix that can no longer be found. This present manifests itself in the form of
containers that the artist has repurposed. These ghosts paradoxically point to a living body of
memories that Rakowitz’s containers unseal.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Division/Institute:	06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Art and Cultural Studies > Institute of Art History > Recent and Modern Art History 06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Art and Cultural Studies > Institute of Art History
UniBE Contributor:	Rossman, Aleksandr Balashov
Subjects:	700 Arts 700 Arts > 730 Sculpture, ceramics & metalwork
Language:	English
Submitter:	Aleksandr Balashov Rossman
Date Deposited:	23 Dec 2022 15:23
Last Modified:	23 Dec 2022 18:38
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/176371